Presented by Prof. Stephan Trüby
Introduction: Elena Kossovskaja

Talk in English

Alexander Brodsky is russian artist and architect. He graduated 1978 from Moscow Architectural Institute. Alexander Brodsky was one of the leaders of Russian ‘paper architects’ from the late 1970s to 1980s, and won many international competitions for utopian architectural projects. His ‘Settlement’ project was exhibited in the Russian Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, and subsequently in the first private Russian Museum of Contemporary Art. Alexander Brodsky creates work that explores his interest in ideas of cultural history, time, memory, and urban environments. Through architectonic forms and the use of serialization, he is able to critically analyze his personal history, as well as the social history of his native Russia and the dissolution of Soviet power. Many of his sculptural installations – acting as indices of memory and the passage of time – and include cities, bodies, and mass-produced or handmade objects that become the loci of cultural and psychological experience.

Yuri Palmin is architectural photographer and started his professional career in 1989. Palmin works as a tutor in British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow, co-taught a course of Urban Studies at MARCH School. He is Co-founder of the Institute of Modernism, non-profit research organization formed in Moscow in 2014. He worked on assignments from Alexander Brodsky, McAdam Architects, Skuratov Architects, Nikolay Lyzlov and others. Palmin participated in art projects with renowned Russian artists Alyona Kirtzova, Vladislav Efimov, and Alexander Brodsky. He accompanied Brodsky installations such as Rotunda, Cloud Café, or Ice House in Pirogovo and created unforgettable images by which the temporary installations by Brodsky became prominent worldwide. For his work 2014, Winter Journey, inspired by the figure of a Swiss architect Luigi Pelli (1771-1861), he repeated his journey in XXI; and that is where the most exciting and unpredicted encounter between matter and memory took place. Palmin is working currently with Elena Kossovskaja on the exhibition Swiss Siedlungen, which explores The Housing Question, possibly the biggest social, and architectural issue of the last century, by the examples of the selected swiss housing estates. The exhibition will be shown in Moscow in May 2016.

More information on:
www.act.ar.tum.de/